Rene — Disneyworld Baghdad: Dungeons to detention camps
Topic(s): Iraq | Comments Off on Rene — Disneyworld Baghdad: Dungeons to detention campsDisneyworld Baghdad: Dungeons to detention camps
Stephen Smith, Electronic Iraq
http://electroniciraq.net/news/printer1592.shtml
6 August 2004
“Disneyworld Baghdad”
Borrowing from French critic Jean Baudrillard, Iraq and its symbol in Abu Ghraib has become “Disneyworld Baghdad.” Here we can draw an analogy to his well-known view of Disneyland.
Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America… Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real…It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. [1]
Abu Ghraib was said to be a grotesque world run by a few “bad apples” in order to make us believe that true respect for human rights exists outside. Confining the images of abuse within the prison walls disguises how this abuse is everywhere. As Susan Sontag observes:
“There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality on to the photographs themselves. The administration’s initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs – as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict.” [2]
Bush also said he wanted to demolish the prison as if it was some kind of evil entity.
Only days before the expose of Abu Ghraib, filmmaker George Gittoes captured the US forces’ creative spin in his new film Soundtrack to War. He finds a gangsta rap scene in the Baghdad streets. He sees soldiers turning their own spaces, in a tent or under a truck, into recording studios:
“There’s an incredible scene in the film where I was just filming him doing a rap about his job and this is in the heat of all the battles that are going on and these special forces guys pull up in their Humvee, totally unaware of the camera, and they say ‘what are you doing here?’ And I say, ‘I am making a film about music.’ And they say, ‘oh yeah, well, music, we’re going to go make some music of our own’ and they jump back in and they drive off and their music is with guns.” [3]
Music created here, mixed with Abu Ghraib swapped images, could have been turned into a digital postcard home. Music video from combat MTV.
Could it be that Gittoes’s subject, much like Disneyworld, hides the fact that its reality is everywhere? (“Their music is with guns.”) With no Abu Ghraib hindsight, he would miss the next step of asking if this rap style is not solely an artefact of the war. Music also has a function: the dissemination of ideology. A link between rap chant and the “fun” of barking orders at helpless prisoners.
Sontag’s comments on the Abu Ghraib pictures might just as easily apply to the rap scene Gittoes was exploring:
“The pictures … reflect a shift in the use made of pictures – less objects to be saved than evanescent messages to be disseminated … Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers – recording their war, their fun … what they find picturesque, their atrocities – and swapping images among themselves, and emailing them around the globe.” [4]
Previews for Soundtrack to War also let us glimpse the weird urban myth of the Baghdad Bee Gees. Gittoes discovered that the group more than exist – they are uncannily like their inspiration. According to Gittoes, the Baghdad Bee Gees learnt to speak English by listening to Bee Gees records; they sound like the Gibb brothers; they look like the Gibb brothers. I feel compelled to adopt them as the mascot of “free” Iraq. The Bees Gees were of course English by birth, raised as “Aussies,” and resident superstars in the USA – children of today’s coalition of the willing, no less. The Baghdad Bee Gees have hit on a harmony perfect simulation. Here is the model for a hyperreal “Saturday Night Fever.” They are a super parody of a seamless transition to a state of “stayin alive.”
Abu Ghraib was a closed circuit where fantasies of torture could be played out. The full extent of the humiliation consists of turning Iraqis and their culture into human “furniture;” props for a “live” theme park. In a reversal of going online, the content is copied and re-enacted before its digital distribution. The practice of hooding and human pyramids was not only already acted out (inside other cell blocks or at “Gitmo”). It also lends itself to digital copying so that those outside the walls can share in and enjoy the experience.
The actions of those taking part in the abuse are, in this scheme, no more to blame than anyone sharing the emails or CDs. How much of this guilt do we all share in an age of news as entertainment? A vital point to be explored is the extent to which this consumption is consent. [5]
The images of abuse from Abu Ghraib are examples of what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal. (Facts preceded by models of them.) Such elements in the prison itself include: lack of an authentic set of rules, “ghost” orders (from Rumsfeld?) in which the limits of torture are blurred in the chain of command; and no fixed level of authority beyond shadow “contractors.” In terms of what is fun or “looks funny” to the guards, abuse is a copy of the violent, pornographic world found online. This aspect of the hyperreal introduces the term “parody” that will also feature in our analysis.
Parody – a poor imitation; a travesty
Baudrillard – the pornography of war
In his May 2004 piece in the French paper Liberation, Baudrillard turns to Abu Ghraib.
He argues that the abject scenes from Abu Ghraib are an obscene banality. They are atrocious and degrading but banal. Not only for the victims but also for the amateur creators of this parody of violence. The US wields overwhelming power. But in Abu Ghraib, the scenes are of a power, which, at its extreme, cannot yet win when faced with an implausible enemy. It can only inflict humiliation. But at the same time it can only degrade and disavow itself. America is exceeded by its own power.
Baudrillard sees a truth in the images: that of a power showing itself to be contemptible and pornographic. He says uncertainty about the veracity of the images is irrelevant; all that counts is the impact of the image. While journalists may be embedded in the war, it is now the soldiers themselves who are immersed in the images of the war. But, unlike journalists, the soldiers immersed in their images can no longer represent the war; they imply neither distance, nor perception, nor judgement. They are no longer about representation or information in any strict sense. They become exactly as virtual as the war itself.
He also finds a great irony in relation to the first Gulf War and the way it was dominated, driven and defined by television. Those who put on the spectacle will perish by the spectacle. You want to control the power of the image? Then you will perish by the return-image. In the iconic image of the hooded prisoner we see the meaning of the whole masquerade that crowns this ignominious war. The dressing up of the victim, for America, becomes an untamed and reversible image. More haunting than this man threatened with electrocution is the realisation that it is really America that has electrocuted itself. Like the hooded prisoner, to fall is also to burn.
He sees as total subterfuge the desperate show of transparency, which answers the desperate show of military power. The true scandal is said to be no longer in the torture, it is in the treachery of those in the chain of command who knew and who said nothing about it (or possibly those who revealed it?). In any event, all real violence is diverted by the need to remake a virtue while at the same time exposing its very defects.
Baudrillard ends by asking: what is the secret of these contemptible images? Once again, the images refer to the humiliation of 9/11, and want to answer it by inflicting worse humiliation. For the Iraqi resistance (who are unafraid of death), the one thing that can be inflicted on them worse than death is dishonour. Let’s look again at the evidence of abuse – hooding and human pyramids and use of attack dogs and walking people on leashes. By such means the “other” will be exterminated symbolically. It is here that he sees that the goal of war is not to kill or exploit, but to abolish (according to Canetti) the light of his sky.
His use of the term parody to describe the US response to an implausible enemy is not too far removed from the conclusions of the independent US 9/11 Commission. Saddam had no proven connection to the 9/11 plot. The conduct and language of the war thus takes on the cloak of parody.
As Josie Appleton points out in her spiked online piece, the Allawi regime is more like a phantom government. It provides a smokescreen for the US-led coalition. The rest is pure parody:
“Before he left, Bremer gave Allawi a letter from Bush asking for diplomatic ties with the regime, as if this new sovereign nation had just sprung up entirely of its own accord. It was almost as if the war had never happened, American troops had never marched into Baghdad, and Bush had never encountered Allawi before.
“This means that all the trappings of the new state – the official titles, ministries and institutions – are just paper fictions, in danger of vanishing at any moment.” [6]
The use (or abuse) of language has tilted many times towards parody. The mockery of French opposition to the war found its most “authoritative” voice in the “cheese eating surrender monkeys” line lifted of course from The Simpsons. We are reminded of the “deck of cards;” nicknames like “Chemical Ali” and “Comical Ali;” and the Jessica Lynch media travesty. Bush took what was a cardboard turkey with him to the Thanksgiving dinner for the troops at Baghdad airport. The capture of Saddam focused on his final retreat into a mere “spider hole.” So ironic after the vaporising (at great loss in civilian lives) of his bunker hideouts.
Humiliation – from looting to Abu Ghraib
The “Disneyland Baghdad” analogy goes beyond Abu Ghraib. In the days after the fall of Baghdad looting spilled over into museums and libraries. But the true extent was disguised by Rumsfeld who saw only a brief outpouring of emotion on to the streets. He even sought to trivialise it by saying that TV was showing footage of the same man stealing a vase over and over.
The Saddam statue toppling became a live event in which US soldiers willingly took part. This attraction was confined to its city arena to hide the fact that staging was the practice all over Iraq. The smash and grab impression of the looting was used to disguise sinister planned raids on heritage sites. The result was to devastate a sense of shared culture among Iraqis, leaving a blank page for the imprint of the US occupying force and the reconstruction to follow.
The catch phrase of the US soldiers who observed the looting, “Go in Ali Baba, it’s yours,” showed how the US often incited looting and failed to meet its obligations to protect heritage sites. (See my previous analysis of this topic)
With the benefit of new evidence over the past year, the extent of loss is now some way known. Scholars were always aware that return of looted items might not suffice if vital documentation was missing.
Their fears have been confirmed. As revealed on Juan Cole’s Informed Comment site, 60 percent of the documents are gone, most of them burned. The loss is heavy for the years of the constitutional monarchy from 1921 to 1958, a time when there were fairly open parliamentary elections held in Iraq.
One facet of the looting missed at the time would have been the humiliation of those who were incited to destroy their own heritage. Loss of morale may not have been of the same order as the physical losses. But inciting of “Ali Babas” should have been seen as an early warning sign that the US was only too willing to use humiliation as a tool of the occupation.
Humiliation takes many forms in Iraq, both inside Abu Ghraib and in everyday street contacts. But it is also worth looking at how Abu Ghraib as a prison or camp compares with the levels of abuse contained in similar settings.
Beyond Abu Ghraib – the hidden matrix of the camp
Abu Ghraib looks more like a refugee camp than a prison. Most of the detainees are living in tents. They are divided up into compounds. They peer through the razor wire … One man wears a t-shirt carrying the words, “why are we here?” [7]
The gap is closing between enemy “non-combatants” and refugees; it is the exclusion of “bare life” (or non-Western “other”) that defines the camp in all its forms. One consequence is that the holding of children in camps is now commonplace.
As Juan Cole notes on his website, in visits to Abu Ghraib and five other prisons, the Red Cross has registered a total of 107 children; and news magazine Der Spiegel reports that US soldiers are said to have abused child detainees.
In Australia, there have been more than 2,100 children put in immigration detention over the last 5 years. [8] These camps are often located in remote desert areas. (In the case of Nauru, the camp is run by a tiny Pacific island state bankrupt but for its reliance on Australia.)
In A Last Resort? the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission points out a vast number of breaches of human rights as set down by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Justice Tony Fitzgerald has also addressed loss of these rights”
“Children in detention have witnessed extreme forms of violence, riots, suicide attempts and self harm. Some have been tear gassed and struck by batons during riots … Other measures which I would describe as inhumane and dehumanizing include giving children (and their parents) a number which they must wear at all times and by which they are known and called; not allowing parents to take any photos of their children … so babies born in detention have no photos recording their growth and development, something most parents take for granted.” [9]
Italian writer Giorgio Agamben has looked at the status of humanity trapped in all manner of camps, ranging from those of the Nazi era to modern refugee camps. In the camp, he describes how a “state of exception” (the temporary suspension of the rule of law) is given a permanent setting, which still remains outside the normal social order. He reminds us that the camp is not a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past. Rather it is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living. It is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognise in all its forms.
Abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib should not be isolated from the outside practice of human rights in the West. Elements from this hidden matrix – including putting children in such places – are common to all camp settings. For inmates of the camp it is the “state of exception” that conceals the “real” – that their inclusion in the social order is solely through exclusion.
Having shown that Abu Ghraib and detention camps have much in common, we can conclude by looking at how the images of each have been represented.
Displacement of the image
We can now reflect on the impact of Abu Ghraib compared to apathy towards the child’s drawing (at top) from an Australian detention camp. The child’s art is representative of attempts by young asylum seekers to make their stories known. The report, A Last Resort? also has a wealth of life stories and analysis that is no less damning than Abu Ghraib but lacks the shock value of the photos.
One such life experience was presented by The Medical Journal of Australia. It reveals the sad case of a 6-year old boy assessed as having severe post-traumatic stress disorder arising from his time in a detention camp. As part of his counseling, the child’s drawings were dominated by the image of the fence. In the foreground and background of one picture he described these impressions:
“They’re crying. They’re all scared. Scared of officers – all of them;” and
“It’s a stick. They bash up children with that wood.”
The child’s drawing has some elements in common with the human rights abuses shown in the Abu Ghraib images. However, apart from lack of photographic proof, a further barrier is how the child’s art is opposed by strong beliefs and values. One such social pressure is the victim’s “code of silence” (a factor also recognised in areas such as domestic violence). The child’s drawing is thus more likely to be dismissed as fantasy. The medical evidence may even be viewed with scepticism. In this respect the child’s reality is disturbing to the public gaze and is displaced into non-belief.
This “code of silence” has been reinforced by Prime Minister John Howard. He has used a campaign of fear to claim that the kids of asylum seekers are political pawns used by people smugglers and others who may threaten border security.
The most chilling example was Howard’s lie in 2001 about asylum seekers throwing their children overboard. The Herald Sun ran the banner headline, OVERBOARD: BOAT PEOPLE THROW CHILDREN INTO THE OCEAN. The paper quoted an angry John Howard saying, “I don’t want people like that in Australia. Genuine refugees don’t do that … They hang onto their children.” When the stricken boat sank the next day, the Howard government faked two navy photos of the rescue as “proof” of the alleged children overboard incident. Naval officers were indeed seen holding children in the water; but the captions had been removed describing the sailors’ heroics in saving children from a sinking boat. [10]
The “children overboard” footage contains aspects of the hyperreal. The “facts” (how the children came to be in the water) are preceded by the “model” of the faked photos. The model is one of a simulation of the refugee as immoral. The truth of what is depicted is seen to be less important than the impact of the images. As a fear tactic it proved decisive in winning the 2001 poll for John Howard.
As Baudrillard suggests, it is not the veracity of images that is important but the impact. Of course the pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib were not faked, but staged to the extent that the soldiers became actors in their own scenes. This raises some crucial points once public outrage is clear. While the abuse shown on TV and on the web caused revulsion, consumption of these images as news implies consent. It shows how far the reality principle can be undermined by banality. There is a need to focus on what the images depict. Such a change would go a long way towards meaningful analysis and informed judgement.
This point is similar to a theme developed by James Der Derian as part of his review of Farenheit 9/11:
“As we are exposed to loop-images of prisoner abuse … at some point (a point rapidly shrinking in duration) between the initial shock produced by the images (are they just too unbelievable?) and the ‘banalisation’ of evil through replication (have they become too familiar?), political realities begin to disappear with a flick of the channel and the click of the mouse. After the serial buzz of the fast edit comes the crash, then the search for greater visual and moral stimulation.” [11]
We can now ask how far it is possible to find truth from our sets of images. The horror of the child’s drawing is resisted by a code that promotes the silence of the victim. Turning to the Abu Ghraib photos we see how they are easily consumed but at the cost of meaningful analysis. From each of these examples, we begin to realise how violence can be displaced. The “Disneyworld Baghdad” analogy helps to explain how the “real” is concealed by its set limits. The end result is to label each case of abuse as an exception to what is seen to be “real” on the outside. The irony is that inside the walls of Abu Ghraib the whole masquerade seemed to implode; those who put on the spectacle perished by the spectacle. Wide access to digital devices immersed the soldiers in their scenes. They became as virtual as the war itself. Their graphic scenes will spark a sensibility to the images we consume. But a shift as well in the depth of understanding will be to better inform us.
Endnotes
[1] Jean Baudrillard, “Simulations.” Semiotext(e), New York, 1983, p. 25
[2] Susan Sontag, “What have we done?” The Guardian, 24 May 2004
[3] Steve Cannane, “Music in war: soldiers in Iraq rap out their experiences.” ABC Online, The World Today, 26 April 2004.
[4] Sontag, “What have we done?”
[5] Jonathan Smith, “The Gnostic Baudrillard: A Philosophy of Terrorism Seeking Pure Appearance.” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Vol 1 No 2.
[6] Josie Appleton, “Get-out policy in Iraq.” Spiked Online, 29 June 2004.
[7] Sally Sara, “US soldier Court Marshalled for abuse of Iraqi prisoners.” ABC Online, AM, 19 May 2004, Reporter: Sally Sara .
[8] Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, “Chapter 3: Setting the Scene – Children in Immigration Detention,” from A last resort? The report of the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention, 13 May 2004. (The report notes that the most number of children held at any one time was 842 in September 2001.)
Updated statistics – Kids in detention in Australia: Total of 117 children in immigration detention, including 90 children held in secure (closed) detention camps. Source: Children Out Of Detention (ChilOut), 28 July 2004.
[9] Speech by Tony Fitzgerald quoted in: Margo Kingston, “Tony Fitzgerald: Howard a “radical.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June 2004.
[10] David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2003, p. 189.
Recent Australian government reaction is also worth noting: the major recommendation of A Last Resort? to release all children within four weeks was swiftly cut down by Howard. Seeming to play on the politics of fear, he said it would be like “sending a beckoning signal to people smugglers.” As reported in “Locking up children puts off smugglers: PM”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 May 2004.
Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone was also quick to raise the spectre of fear: “I believe that people smugglers would go around and snatch kids to put on boats. People will masquerade as the parents of children,” she said.
Amanda Vandstone, Enough Rope with Andrew Denton, ABC TV, 24 May 2004.
[11] James Der Derian, “Moore or less morality.” Al-Ahram Weekly, 1-7 July 2004.
Other references
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998
Jean Baudrillard, “Pornographie de la guerre,” Liberation, 19 May 2004
Babelfish English translation
In the original French
Juan Cole, “60% of Documentation for modern Iraqi history lost.” Informed Comment, 26 April 2004.
Juan Cole, “Children detainees in Iraq?” Informed Comment, 8 July 2004.
George Gittoes, Soundtrack to war, Street Stories, ABC Radio National, 30 June 2004.
Karen J Zwi, Brenda Herzberg, David Dossetor and Jyotsna Field, “A Child in Detention: Dilemmas faced by health professionals.” The Medical Journal of Australia, MJA 2003, 179 (6): 319-322.
Stephen Smith is a freelance writer who lives in Australia’s capital city of Canberra. As well as Electronic Iraq, he has written pieces for Znet and Melbourne Indymedia. He can be contacted at: goalside@cyberone.com.au